The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I just spent several hours setting this up and testing it before I realized it doesn't work with Canadian taxes. Someone in their forums has developed a hack for this, but they are charging $100 for it. Very disappointing, but if you're in the US I'm sure it's great.

I can't believe all the bitter comments toward a full featured, completely free piece of software.

I've tested VM on smaller personal sites for over a year before being comfortable enough to use it on a client site. I set the client up with the FedEx real-time shipping module processing payments through Authorize. The website processes 2.5K - 4K in orders per week. We've had it running for a little over 3 months with no problems whatsoever.

The software required a little hammering out to make it work exactly as we wanted it, but as a non-programmer I was able to get it exactly as the client requested.

As a result, this is the first open source software I've made voluntary donations to. It's an excellent piece of software. Installs easily, completely customizable, and always forward moving.

Install VM and test it out. You won't be disappointed.

On first review looked complicated but I'm getting to grips with it after a couple of days. I like it. Fits very well with joomla with a look and feel matching the joomla site. Covers most things and only a couple of small problems setting up states and dropdown values for registration fields. Integrated with Paypal in a few minutes.

Well I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised when I installed virtuemart, esp after reading all the other recent reviews. The install went smoothly, and I had my product added and listed in about 10mins without any trouble. Maybe that's the secret, do a fresh install??

Anyway, very pleased with this version of VirtueMart.

I am not one to give a bad report, and actually this is the first ever in 3 years with Joomla & Mambo. After installing 1.1.0 new version - I found my category views of content were not coming up at all. I figured well easy fix... Wasn't easy at all, and as a matter of fact I had to uninstall it.

After uninstalling the component, I continued to get another error in the menu settings, I had to hand remove the other part that didn't remove from virtuamart. I really LOVE the way Virtuamart installs, blends with the templates in Joomla and the back end admin area - WOW... BUT having to drop back to the older version just to get it to work.

YES - I did review all over the web - to include posting on Their Forums and NO one would ever answer me or bother to help - They say it is active, but seems to be pretty dead there unless it is just one main topic. I Really hoped for more from such a high quality group of creators to be honest - and Yeah I know this is free, but still to someone that didn't know any code, this would have just ruined their website and they would have had to rebuild.

Anyway - I hope to upgrade to 1.1.0 when the bugs are worked out of the category area - as we draw traffic now really well and just wanted to add in a great shop. THANK YOU for building it, just please support what you do built when you have time, please. It matters! Specially when you have people that love what you do and want it badly enough to come to you to ask for help, don't ignore them - bad business. Wishing you well with the bugs.

Allen

Be very wary of this software. It is very badly structured and thus if you are trying to style it up, it can literally take hours trying to find out where class tags are.

Imagine that you are holding the end of a piece of string. The rest of the string is on gigantic knot that fills the room. You then discover that there is more than one ball of string knotted into this bundle.

Now unravel it - welcome to Virtuemart.

The forums are littered with people asking questions that rarely get an answer.

I am a professional web designer/developer and even I gave up on it in the end.

If you want to know how an open source shopping cart should be done, go to www.zencart.net. This was recommended to me after I gave up on Virtuemart. It doesn't work inside Joomla, it is a standalone product but if you are looking to build a store I strongly advise you go to Zen. The code is elegantly and logically structured. The site is easy to mark-up with CSS and there is a search function so you can find where code is in any document.

Oh, and the developers of Zen don't put a message on their site saying code is more important than design so they may or may no get around to looking at design problems.

I tried the latest release of virtuemart for Joomla 1.5 and I have nothing good to say. I appreciate all the efforts of the virtuemart team but they must understand that their component is still not ready for Joomla 1.5.

Personally I had several error warnings setting up the shop and as not being an experienced user I got afraid and gave up.

I am currently using another component (unfortunately a commercial one) and I do not have a single problem.

All I regret is the time I have lost trying to make virtuemart work.

Not for me.

What I feared with having read some of the reviews of VirtueMart came true: Lots of questions on the forums, but no answers. Don't get me wrong, the whole idea behind this product is great and ought to be supported. But I'm afraid this current version just doesn't work. My Joomla 1.5.3 site hardly has any modifications to it as it's currently in the development stages, and yet a simple and basic configuration change on the Authorize.net payment module nets nothing. It's too bad that many here waited for this new version only to be let down at the end.

This has to be the best shopping cart for Joomla out there! It really has everything you need to set up a store using Joomla.

All you need to do is install it, set up a few categorys and your good to go.

Highly recommended!

The back end is painfully slow! Problem in co-operation with Joomla 1.5? The old versions were nice!

I am a big of the Joomla Project. I think Joomla has great potential. I tried to install the Joomla Ecommerce package from the VitueMart's website and had several problems from the start. One of the biggest problems was that I could not see the administrator menu bar in the joomla admin site after i the install.

If i was going to install this on my own site, I would love to test it out an report bugs. But since its for a customer, I don't want to upset them and I am going to use a more tried and tested shopping cart.

I have been a huge proponent of VirtueMart for the past years. However this latest version is a nightmare. I installed it for a couple clients and ended up losing both of them because of all the bugs. I still recommend VirtueMart just not the most current version.

This new version is screwed up, the add to cart button, quantity boxes and a the whole template system is jacked. I cant get the add to cart button on the product list pages to show not matter how much I mess with it. Also, it has an issue with Joomla template assignments. On top of that, there is no support for these issue on their site.

I would wait until the next version, because this one is not ready for to be distributed.

I waited and waited and waited and it is here! Great job! Love the new look. However I am having problems importing products, etc. I would love to see this done an easier way. Unfortunately I am not nifty with codes so I have no suggestions. Other than that it is a wonderful program.

this was a easy package to setup. But then all of the sudden my buttons Add to Cart, check Out and Basket disappeared.The link is there, the the buttons are not visible. I have sent email to support and have not heard anything since. My whole store had to shut down.

This is exactly what I was looking for.
Installation and configuration was faultless and it does exactly what I want it to do.
Would highly recommend this product to anyone who wishes to see online, whether shippable goods or downloads, this shopping cart covers it all.
Well done and keep up the good work.

In the hands of someone who takes some time to learn this tool, the design of your store will be limited only by your imagination. If you’re a serious programmer needing an advanced e-commerce framework to make major customizations, VM is an older code base and I would imagine there are better choices. It isn't going to give you Amazon.com exactly. However, for the average store and especially if you need it to integrate with Joomla, Virtuemart is very good. If you’re in doubt of this, go to their forum and check out some of the sites made with it.

I’m amazed at some of the negativity I’ve seen about Virtuemart. Some of it is based on their forum support. Let’s remember that this is a very small team of VOLUNTEERS trying to help a huge number of users. Yet if you ask something in the right place that hasn’t already been answered (and aren’t a pushy _ _ _), someone will help you. Before you get upset, keep in mind that a lot of bugs you may come across are actually a problem with your own server or browser setup.

Let’s face it, e-commerce is not for the faint of heart…even in 2008. Virtuemart makes it about as easy as it comes for a beginner, but you very well may have to sort through a few bugs and challenges. Don’t give up. Once you get through a site or two, I think you’ll find this an amazing tool!

A few things it has:

* An easy to use theming system which gives you full control of layout and style
* A strong integration with Joomla. There are 13 optional modules plus plugins to integrate with the normal Joomla search and allow for inserting products into Joomla articles. Users are synchronized, and products or categories can be linked to from Joomla menus
* Good CSV import/export with an addon called CSV extended
* Most of the features you’ll find in other open source shopping carts
* Hacks are available for adding certain features (although some haven't been updated)

Some things it doesn’t have:

* Joomla native SEF. However, there are 3rd party SEF extensions that work with it
* Events, Subscriptions, wish list
* Comprehensive reporting
* Backend is clunky for making multiple edits or additions (although csv extended can solve this if you’re technically saavy)
* Poor, untemplatable custom fields implementation (product types)
* Dynamic front end product attributes
* A sexy front end out of the box (as Magento)

I have never written a review for anything before. But I feel compelled to out of disappointment in what could and should be the flagship component for Joomla. I have tried on many occasions to use VirtueMart. Each time I find it to be buggy in areas that I would not expect a stable app to be, such as (Stable 1.10) menu selections in the admin panel. Any questions you might have, indeed is in their forums. Unfortunately, most of the answers are not.

Well it looks good when you first download it.. but from then on, it gets worse. The admin is poor and looks and functions awful. Installation is not straight forward. Support is awful. Trying to work with the code is a nightmare. I'm a web developer and I have NEVER seen code as bad as this. Pointless class methods and too much pointless code. Obviously the people who wrote this were stepping on each other's toes. Guy's, take a look at osCommerce, because that's a real ecommerce package. It worries me that something so popular is written so horrifically.

I have been using VirtueMart for a couple of years and had never really taken the time to explore it's full potential.

We sell the same producs but at a range of different prices to different customers and I was thrilled to discover that you can set up a new Shopper Group for each type of customer and then allocate a different price for each Group - GREAT!

Now I just need it to automatically upgrade customers to a more discounted Shopper Group when they hit a predetermined monthly sales figure and I won't have to do any admin at all!

Thanks for a great product.